Cooking with mealworms and crickets? Here's your chance to learn how.

Ja'von Latimore, 28, is a culinary instructor, entomologist and photographer who is doing cooking classes and teaching people how to use insects such as mealworms and crickets in everyday dishes as an extra source of protein.(Photo: Ent Tune/Special to the Register)

For this culinary instruction, you'll be learning to make wild mushroom risotto with mealworms and chocolate chip cake with cricket flour.

Yes, you read that correctly.

In no time you'll be whipping up dishes using ingredients such as grasshoppers, beetles and honeybee drones. You'll learn to make simple protein smoothies using cricket protein powder.

Insect Cuisine with Chef Cass and Ent Tune is a new kind of cooking class that focuses on preparing familiar cuisine using unfamiliar ingredients. The class takes place on Thursday, Oct. 4 from 6-8 p.m. at the Des Moines Social Club, 900 Mulberry St. in downtown Des Moines. Tickets are $50 per person.

Bugging Out is taught by Ja'von Latimore, 28, an Iowa State entomology graduate. While her hands-on classes are launching, Latimore, a Minnesota native, is a bartender at Scissors & Scotch in West Des Moines.

Ja'von Latimore, entomologist and instructor for Ent_Tune culinarey classes.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

"Insects are healthy, sustainable and tasty — with this class, people will have the opportunity to learn how to cook with them and how to handle them," Latimore said. "With over 2,000 insects, there's going to be an array of tastes. Nothing is unfamiliar, but some flavors are going to be new, so it's an opportunity for people to open up their palates."

Latimore said the class is also a way for some to get over that "ick factor" associated with insects and instead "discover something that tastes good."

"It's mind over matter," she added.

Culinary students will taste the whole insect as well as learn to make dishes with both visible insects and insect products so they won't be seen in other dishes.

A sampling of dishes made with insects. Ent_Tune cooking classes teach people how to incorporate insects into everyday meals.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

To bee or not to bee

So how did Latimore progress from entomology — the study of insects — to entomophagy, which is the eating of insects?

"Iowa State University has the third largest entomology literature collection in the country, and the first book I picked up was about entomophagy," Latimore said. "It was called 'Edible' by Daniella Martin and everything she wrote made sense to me."

After college, Latimore worked in her field studying corn earworms for Syngenta. But she found herself more fascinated with discovering how to turn corn earworms into tortillas instead.

Mealworms, ready for cooking. Ent_Tune cooking classes show how you can add this protein source into everyday dishes.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

That's when Latimore made the decision to base her work on this sustainable food source and help educate people on using insects as ingredients in everyday recipes. The first dish she made was wild mushroom risotto with mealworms.

"I brought it to a cookout for one of my professors," Latimore said. "There were some people that didn't try it because of the 'ick factor,' and then there were some people who tried it and actually thought it was good. I was told it all blended well together."

Latimore has spent four years educating herself on more than 2,000 species of edible insects worldwide but is basing her focus on pesticide-free bugs that can be found locally.

A mealworm salad from an Ent_Tune cooking class.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

"There aren't that many in the United States currently that I can get locally or as close to Iowa as possible," Latimore said.

Her current list includes mealworms, ants, honeybee drones, crickets, cricket flour, and cricket protein powder. If Latimore hasn't eaten an insect before, first she tries them plain like popcorn or chips. Then based on individual taste, she experiments by soaking, marinating, baking, sautéing and mixing the insects with sugar and butter.

Latimore has ordered—and chowed down on—bugs from other countries such as sago worms, giant waterbugs, queen weaver ants and assorted pupae. But for her own recipes, the focus is on non-invasive species native to Iowa.

These gluten-free, protein-packed morsels could be a way to help provide a new and sustainable food source as the world's population continues to grow. "And there are so many other benefits that you can get, like fiber, macro- and micronutrients and iron."

She recently gave a bag of cricket flour to her mother in Minneapolis to help with an iron deficiency.

Even though insect farming would provide ample amounts of protein in a minimal amount of space with only a fraction of the methane output of livestock farms, Latimore's intention is not to compete with Iowa farmers, but instead introduce a new option.

Mealworm egg rolls being made in an Ent_Tune cooking class.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

"A lot of farmers want to argue that I'm trying to replace meat," Latimore said. "I want to teach people that they can farm these on their countertop as opposed to going and getting them from a store."

It only takes a matter of weeks to grow insects from eggs to adults, feeding them nothing but vegetable and fruit scraps. And when it comes to harvesting?

"Just put them in the freezer," Latimore said. "Just like in the winter, crickets die when they freeze and the eggs will survive to hatch the next year."

She noted that the same method also works for mealworms.

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Busy as a bee

Latimore currently works with Chef Cassandra Spence of the Des Moines Social Club to spread the word about this new way of cooking.

"Anyone who is open and willing to learn about how to cook with insects, send them my way," Latimore said.

She also has plans to continue with booking more private dinners, symposiums, and monthly cooking classes. On top of cooking, eating and farming insects, Latimore still has more business ideas that rotate around her love of entomology.

Honeycomb on a beekeeping frame. Ent_Tune cooking classes show how male drones can be harvested and eaten in various everyday dishes.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)

"I'm a professional insect photographer and I want people to see the beauty that I see when I see insects," she said. Latimore's photographs are available from her website and social media.

Latimore also provides honeybee drone cleaning services to beekeepers. Some keepers use drones for mite control. "If they have frames full of drones, I'll take those drones out and give the clean frames back," she explained.

What would she use the drones for? Culinary purposes, of course. But if you're concerned about endangered honeybees, don't worry.

"It would only be the drone bees that we would be eating because they only mate and die, and nothing else," Latimore said.

An example of insect photography by Ja'von Latimore, entomologist and Ent_Tune cooking class instructor.(Photo: Ent_Tune/Special to the Register)